Another Dave and Dana

A curiosity I came across some time ago when tracking down Grapevine duo Dave and Dana's excellent albums.

I had found four albums, and then a fifth album came up called Dave and Dana R Victorious. This was stored in the University of Florida Library. It turned out there was another gospel duo called Dave and Dana, Dave Van Cise and Dana Arnold, and it was they who had recorded this eight song album. The album cover shows the duo, "clad in white, holding hands and smiling at the camera," the library said. It was recorded by the Dove Gospel Recording Service in Florida and undated.

Review of 2008

 My thanks first of all to those who contributed and helped with the site last year, notably John Pac of Parchment and former Parchment roadie Dixie Dean.

The big story of 2008 was the discovery of the lost third album. John Pac announced it with four words "it's lost no more". This site was privileged to get a listen of the missing album and John later supplied full details of authorship of the tracks. You can follow the story of the discovery here.

This opened up new by-ways, especially evidence of the strong influence that Ry Cooder had on the band's choice of material. And journeys on YouTube also led to a video of the original writer of Pack Up Your Sorrows, Richard Farina, performing the song. Sadly the video was withdrawn shortly afterwards for copyright reasons.

The other big event of the year was the reunion of the band Caedmon - the 'other' Xian acid folk band. It's members flocked onto the site to to tell their stories before setting up their own website. There was no obvious direct link to Parchment but one was soon discovered!

We continued, slowly, cataloguing the material that's gathered on this site. It can be found here.

And we continued to explore the Grapevine label, which the members of Parchment ran in the late 1970s. The discovery of the year was MCC's exquisite Thursday's Child has Far to Go - although the first Grapevine album Ride! Ride! turned out to have an interesting story. And Grapevine star Dave Price popped up to tell us where he was.

Wishlist for 2009? First of all that it will be as interesting and eventful for this site as 2008 and 2007. Secondly, that a way will be found to circulate the lost album. Thirdly, another big find - perhaps some live footage or bootleg sound of the band performing?

And as time permits I will post other archive material and continue to pursue threads that grab my attention.

Happy New Year!

A year ago I set out a number of resolutions for this site and sadly many of them were never fulfilled. But it didn't matter because a great many other things happened and 2008 proved just as interesting a year as 2007.

Let's look first at what I set out to do:

• I promised to post more material from Buzz. Sorry, haven't got round to it.
• I called for more reviews of Parchment's work and indeed found an intriguing blog review of Shamblejam. And there were features on one or two of the band's songs.
  
• I wanted to continue to find out about the Grapevine label and its artists - and yes, that enjoyable search has carried on.
• I wanted to know more about Trinity Folk, the first incarnation of Parchment. Maybe one or two clues emerged but there's still a story waiting to be told.
• And then there was Roundabout 2008, part of Liverpool's year of European culture. We completely missed the long awaited reunion in July, which featured the Rycroft cousins, and I see we've missed a couple more events in the autumn and another chance to hear Keith Rycroft perform.

As I said at the outset of this blog, it's a hobby, fitted into the corners of my life. Nevertheless I hope it continues to encourage others the way it encourages me. It's got going over the last couple of years because people have joined in and shared their memories, their love of the music that has emanated from Parchment and the musicians associated with the band and even how it may help point to God.

Next: so what did we get up to in 2008 and how did I managed to find 28 postings about an obscure band that folded 30 years ago?

Happy New Year and I hope it's even better than yesterday!

Where the Cross and the Manger Meet

This is a song from River's third album Shadow and Flame.

It's a great song, written by Sue Rivers Mack, aka Sue McClellan of Parchment.

"....A saviour born to show eternal life begins
Where the cross and the manger meet."

Here's a link to the full lyric.


HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Pandora

I've noticed a number of visitors trying to access the Pandora "world of Parchment" radio station we created some time ago. Many will have been disappointed because, for some reason, Pandora's activities have been restricted to the USA recently. The issue appears to be something to do with copyright licensing.

This is sad as Pandora offered an interesting collection of music, old and new, along with quite a sophisticated analysis. It introduced me to quite a number of bands and singers and led to the purchase of a number of CDs, It had just included its first Parchment tracks, from the Under the Silent Tree compilation CDs.

The last.fm radio site contains a Parchment page and a "Parchment" radio channel, largely based, so as I can see, on the Folk is a Four Letter Word 2 CD. Last.fm also has a small "Xian folk" group but the station doesn't seem to have the range of Pandora.

Sound Vision in Concert

This 1970 live album is the only live recording I've been able to trace of Trinity Folk or Parchment in concert. In spite of regular appearances at major events over the next eight years, the band were never again captured live on vinyl. Trinity Folk, at the time a four piece, played Working Man and Laugh ("I want you all to laugh") and also feature providing backing vocals and music to compere Judy MacKenzie.

A live album was made of a similar Sound Vision concert a year earlier in 1969 called Alive!. That featured a young Graham Kendrick performing in his beat band Whispers of Truth.

Aside from Trinity Folk (pictured here), the 1970 album has other interesting features, as I discovered when I ripped it to mp3 and listened to it a few times. Among the performers was a young folk trio called Carol, John & Aubrey, who sang folk harmonies, rather like Peter, Paul and Mary. When I first obtained the album in the early 70s I used to think their mid-60s style was rather dated but listening again, their songs have become interesting, if only for the lyrics. I've been unable to find out any more about this trio - perhaps they will stand up and identify themselves!

Their first song Sunday Morning is striking in itself - "He's the man in pinstripe trousers, never goes in public houses...goes to church on Sunday morning". The song describes a middle-aged man of impeccable virtue, especially by modern standards, but "deep inside there's something missing, something he can't explain."

On the face of it it's straightforward evangelicalism - going to church does not make you a Christian. But look at the youth of the performers and listen to it again. It's also a generational challenge from the young to the old. Listen to it now and you realise it is equally a challenge to that self-same generation, now middle-aged, still going to church but have they lost their First Love, their youthful zeal? How have they survived four decades? And where is the modern generation of youth challenging its elders?

Then there's their third song Hands. Here are the lyrics. The song is attributed jointly to the band and Doug Barnett:

Whose hands are these so fragile and white,
playing on Mary's cheek on this cold, lonely night?
These are the hands that flung stars into space,
made mighty oaks, gave the eagle its grace.

Whose hands are these?

Whose hands are these in compassion and care
stretched to the leper bound down with despair?
These are the hands that made all things good;
these hands can feel where no other hands could.

Whose hands are these ripped open by nails,
bound to a cross while the mid-day sun fails?
These are the hands that bought sin and set free,
bring to your life God's true liberty.

Note the third line. 12 years later it was "sampled" by Graham Kendrick (who played backing guitar at this concert) for his popular and evocative song Servant King. A quick google reveals that Kendrick's line "hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered" is now regarded as one of the most poetic phrases to emerge from modern Christian music. If indeed this is the original source of this striking phrase, it  has never been attributed.

There's a full tracklisting on Sound Vision now posted on the archive pages here.

The lost album - full credits

John Pac has supplied the full list of credits for the lost album:

1/ Money Honey (Jesse Stone)
2/ Wild, Wild Woman (John Pac)
3/ I Really Don't Mind/Jet Plane (Sue McClellan)
4/ Denomination Blues (Washington Phillips)
5/ Chicago North Western (Juicy Lucy)
6/ Fast Train (John Pac)
7/ Morning Love, Morning Freedom (Sue McClellan)
8/ How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live (Ry Cooder/ Alfred Reed)
9/ Tom (John Pac)
10/ You Mean a Lot to Me (Sue McClellan)
11/ We're Over Here (John Pac)
12/ People and Places (John Pac/Sue McClellan))
13/ A Matter of Time (John Pac)

Band members: John Pac, Sue McClellan, Jeff Crow

This shows the album had more original songs than I thought at first. Wild Wild Woman and Chicago North Western were to have been singles. I had tracked down several other "wild woman" songs but John's rendering of the concept compared with the best of them.

He says Wild, wild woman was not written for anyone in particular. Fast Train was written for his future wife, who lived in the west of England and Tom was written for his cat Mr Jinx.


There's still uncertainty about what will happen with the material. John's current thinking is that it's too unfinished to publish as a cohesive album. It would be a shame if the band's many fans never got a chance to hear any of it. If you're one of those, why not post your ideas here.

The Eurovision Entry

John Pac's been in touch about the lost album and revealed a fascinating snippet of information - the song People and Places was in fact written as an entry for the 1974 Eurovision song contest. John says it "did quite well" but didn't make the final six in the Song for Europe contest that was used to select the British entry. If it had made the shortlist, it would have been sung by Grease star Olivia Newton-John, who had been chosen by the BBC to represent Britain that year, and sang all the short-listed songs on primetime TV.

She went on to sing a song called Long Live Love, which, ironically, was a pseudo-gospel number. It didn't win - there was stiff competition that year. The winner was an obscure band from Sweden called Abba with a song called Waterloo.

Resisting the temptation to post a youtube video of Abba, here is the British entry. And here's a link to the sample of People and Places that's available with the Simply...Parchment CD (see left). I know which I prefer - but could Olivia Newton-John have sung the song as well as Sue McClellan? People and Places was, of course, re-recorded by the band for the Rehearsal for a Reunion album.

More on the lost album to follow...

News from the Grapevine

Grapevine artist Dave Price, half of Dave and Dana, has posted some news on the blog. Dave and Dana recorded one Grapevine album, Morning Star, produced by Sue McClellan, and an earlier album Come on In with Pilgrim and produced by John Pantry. We were so impressed with their quality we tracked down two more great albums, Satisfied, their first self-pressed album, and their fourth album, Right Track, released on a Canadian label.

Dave's now in Mobile, Alabama, and still makes a lot of music, he reports, working in gospel, jazz and praise music. The name of the county, Mobile, comes from a Native American tribe, according to Wikipedia. Full details are here.

Pack Up Your Sorrows

Whilst mining YouTube I've come across an original version of Pack Up Your Sorrows played by its authors Richard and Mimi Farina together with Pete Seeger. It's a great recording and Richard Farina is playing the dulcimer, a much under-rated instrument.

Parchment's amazing version is of course nothing like this! Here's a sample from the CrossRhythms site.



Here's a link to our original posting on the history of this song...

Denomination Blues

Here's a YouTube posting of Washington Phillips' remarkable original version of Denomination Blues, from the 1920s:



The sweet-sounding instrument backing the song was apparently known as a dulceola but nobody quite knows what it was.

Parchment's second version of the song, recorded as the opening track on Shamblejam and familiar to quite a lot of people, is probably closest to this, relying as it does on John Pac's raw vocals and the simple mandolin accompaniment. The version that has emerged on the lost album
is lusher.

Phillips recorded two "parts" to the song. This part is Part I and doesn't include the notable line: if you ain't got Jesus, you's an educated fool.

More samples can be found at one of the labels that has released his songs on CD.

Ry Cooder

The 'lost album' reveals the extent that Parchment MkII was influenced by Ry Cooder, who seems best described as a country/blues/folk musician.

The album contains two songs How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live and also Denomination Blues, which he popularised. The first was written in 1929 by "Blind" Alfred Reed and the second by Washington Phillips.

Denomination Blues was re-recorded for Shamblejam. Then for Rehearsal for a Reunion the band recorded Jesus on the Mainline, another song taken up by Ry Cooder.

So here's a great nine-minute video of Cooder performing Poor Man. I promise you the Parchment version is also terrific - and it's nothing at all like this.



And here's Cooder's version of Jesus on the Mainline:


To complete the circle Cooder has recently performed with gospel singer Mavis Staples, who recently headlined for Roundabout 2008 in Liverpool.

Lost album - full tracklisting

This is the tracklisting of the copy of the lost album that has surfaced. It might not have been released like this, had it been issued by Pye in 1974/5, and might well not be released in this form finally.

Song authors are attached where known. At a guess I would say You Mean a Lot to Me and A Matter of Time are Sue McClellan compositions:

1/ Money Honey (Jesse Stone)
2/ Wild, Wild Woman
3/ I Really Don't Mind
4/ Denomination Blues (Washington Phillips)
5/ Chicago North Western (Juicy Lucy)
6/ Don't Like Being Away/Fast Train (John Pac/Band)
7/ Morning Love, Morning Freedom
8/ How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live (Ry Cooder/ Alfred Reed)
9/ Old Tom Cat
10/ You Mean a Lot to Me
11/ We're Over Here
12/ People and Places (Band)
13/ A Matter of Time

Band members: John Pac, Sue McClellan, Jeff Crow

I've found several songs with the same name as Old Tom Cat and Wild, Wild Woman but none seem to be the same ones as on this album. So they may be original compositions.

On the seventh and eighth hearing...

Brilliant!

On first hearing the lost album

There have been moments of sheer undiluted pleasure, if not joy, over the last few years.

One of those was hearing Parchment's "lost" single You Were on My Mind for the first time. A second was hearing River's You Are There followed one after the other by that band's CDs.

The first hearing of Caedmon and Whitsuntide Easter comes close to this.

As does the unique experience of being privileged to be one of the first people to hear the lost third Parchment album that was never released by Pye.

It's surprising!

But only when you consider each of Parchment's albums had very different styles. Let's face it, they were one of those bands you never knew quite what to expect with each album, especially once you'd heard Light Up the Fire, the album. You'd listen to each one, waiting for the amazing sounds of the original album and not quite hearing them - yet on further listenings they'd be there, the mandolin, the harmonies, the folkie roots, Sue's backing vocals, John Pantry's subtle, clever production techniques.

And by the second listening you are hooked...

At first hearing, it's very country rock. The rhythm guitar is prominent in a way you don't hear in the band's other albums. By the second hearing, you realise it could be another Parchment great - an album which blends their distinctive sound and talents with bold adventures into a particular musical style.

Side 2 (or the second half) is terrific! We're Over Here sounds like an echo of Trinity Folk's folk-club roots. Old Tom Cat is a great prog folk track. And there's a radically different version of People and Places from the one released, sometime later, on Rehearsal for a Reunion. And the final track is amazing - it's just too short and needs a good fade-out.

Side 1 sounds, at first, a little like a pub band. Quite a lot of other people's songs. There's Denomination Blues, re-released on Shamblejam with slightly different production. Imagine too their  version of Ry Cooder's Poor Man.

What I've heard has an unfinished, bootleg feel - for instance not much of an intro to the album, if the track ordering is correct. Most of the tracks are quite short - few pass three minutes and some of the best songs could do with more fade-out.

I understand a copy was found on a cassette tape - so it's still not the master tape that John Pac had been searching for and may affect any decision about releasing it on CD. To my untutored ear it still sounds pretty good.

No doubt there are other issues affecting a release, copyrights, permissions - it could take a while.

My guess is that John must be thinking of a Simply...Parchment Part 2 - use most of these tracks, leave out the least original ones and throw in classics like Working Man, Zip Bam Boo, Golden Game and Shine on Me that were omitted from Simply..Parchment.

Full track-listing to follow and I hope in due course to get the go-ahead to post some samples of the music. The band for this album was John Pac, Sue McClellan, Jeff Crow.

This was the posting which detailed John Pac's original recollections about this album.

The poet and the elephant foot

A fascinating revelation gives a reason to mention another personality from this era. Our recent link to a review of Shamblejam, Parchment's third album, has thrown up a comment on the other site from punk rockster Bill Mason. Bill mentions that the cover shots for Shamblejam were taken in the London home of poet Stewart Henderson.

The picture shows Brian Smith, Sue McClellan and John Pac in settings which seem to have been lifted from the Victorian age. If you had the US version you probably only had the cover shot - I think it was a single sleeve album. The British gatefold version uses photographs front, back and inside with paraphernalia shots of paraphernalia such as a model elephant and lampstand. As always with this band, the artwork seemed to work brilliantly, reflecting in this case the hippy, folky roots of the music. Nowadays you wonder what they thought they were doing with an elephant-foot stool and a leopard-skin rug on an album which featured songs such as "Green Psalm".

And so to Stewart Henderson. It always seemed he must be closely connected with Parchment. Both came from Liverpool although there is no mention of Henderson having been involved in the Roundabout arts project. Henderson produced poetry similar in kind to the Mersey Beat poets, fun, simple in language, witty, short and thought-provoking. It seemed too good to be true that the Mersey region which had produced Roger McGough, Adrian Henri and Brian Patten could produce another equally talented poet. Yet it wasn't. In 1975 the Dovetail label issued an album of his poems Whose Idea of Fun is a Nightmare, produced by John Pantry . Henderson went on to have a successful career as a journalist, a broadcaster and a poet - although like others of his contemporaries his recent output seems to have been aimed more at childen and the schools market than anything else.

Nightmare was recently posted by the Ancient Star Song blog.

A curiosity

This version of the Light Up the Fire single has just gone under the hammer on ebay from a Spanish seller. There's a curious thing about it - the happy smiling faces on the front are not Parchment. They look like an early 70s pop or rock band. Does anybody know who they are?

Presumably somebody got their instructions mixed up at the printers. An oddity.

Grapevine's first album

Thornill, Thwaites and Coe Ride! Ride! 1976. Producer: John Pac. GRV101

Grapevine's first album was a popular Methodist musical that in 1976 made its London West End debut at the Westminster Theatre - and seems to have quite a story behind it. The musical, based on a story about John Wesley in London was written by Alan Thornhill, a Methodist minister who was also an established playwright. The music was provided by a young Australian musician Penelope Thwaites.

When it gained a place at a prestigious London theatre, the musical was placed in the hands of a notable director Peter Coe, who had been responsible for the first staging of Oliver! Cast members included Caroline Villiers, Gordon Gostelow, Brendan Barry, Richard Warner, Jeremy Anthony, Kim Goody, Raymond Skipp, Abby Hadfield and Jane Martin.

The recording must have been a coup for the new label. Sales were guaranteed and the aim was to reproduce the atmosphere of a West End musical.

And that was when the trouble began. There appears to have been some dispute between Alan Thornhill and Peter Coe over the staging of the show. The album reflects Peter Coe's direction and this seems to have included adding songs to the score. Thornhill's papers have been collected by Wheaton University, USA, and the catalogue gives a flavour of the correspondence that ensued.

More recently a new version of the musical was published and a CD released. The publishers of the new version Bardic Music state: "Recordings and publications connected with the 1976 London production are no longer sanctioned for use and are therefore in breach of current copyright." The copyright issue is being pursued with some seriousness as the Ancient Star Song blog discovered when it tried to post the Grapevine album. Penelope Thwaites posted on the Star Song setting out some of the background. None of this prevents interested listeners from buying second hand copies of the Grapevine album and they are still in circulation.

I'm no great fan of musicals but I quite enjoyed the vinyl version. And was that a mandolin I hear on some of the tracks?

Roundabout reunion

Well, we missed the Roundabout Reunion event.

It took place a month ago on July 5th. Roundabout was the Christian arts movement in Liverpool in the 60s/70s that seems to have spawned Trinity Folk, Parchment, Reynard. Roundabout 2008 has been endeavouring to catch the spirit for the city's European Capital of Culture Year.

The reunion featured Parchment founder member Keith Rycroft along with his cousin Dave Rycroft, who had played with Reynard.

it also featured the reconstituted Roundabout theatre company and local rising star Rachael Wright. She now has her own website and you can sample her music here.

Did anybody attend? How did it go?

John Pantry

John Pantry was the production genius who worked on all four Parchment albums. He had developed his skills in parallel with the music industry in the 1960s, working with some of the big names of the era, most notably, I think, the Small Faces and the early (pre-disco) Bee Gees and enjoys semi-legendary status amongst fans of the genre.

Undoubtedly he played a big part in shaping Parchment's recorded sound. I've referred to him a few times over the last few years but had avoid a specific posting for fear of getting crucial details wrong. For instance I knew that Light Up the Fire was his first Christian music album but had heard he became a Christian after working on it. John went on to be a key player in Christian music, producing dozens of albums and launching as a solo artist and song-writer in his own right. He then achieved ordination in the Church of England before returning to music as a radio presenter with Premier Radio.

Premier has now posted a fairly full biography and that states that Pantry was converted before working on Light Up the Fire - so I stand corrected.

Other notable productions that he worked on included version two of Water Into Wine Band's Hill Climbing for Beginners - the US version - and several Grapevine albums, such as Unity's Changes, and Salt's Beyond a Song. Pre-Grapevine he had done amazing work on Dave and Dana's Come on In and the couple paid tribute to him with a terrific and passionate version of his song 'Empty-Handed' on their Grapevine album Morning Star.

Another interesting and early example of his work, Canaan, released on the Dovetail label, has been posted on the Ancient Star Song recently. The style of the band was country rock but the review refers to the "acid guitar" of the album. This was Pantry all over and it was a style ideal for the emerging Christian music scene in Britain as well as for the late 60s psychedelic music scene. One of his tricks was to pull out and highlight shortish instrumental rifts, enabling the listener to appreciate great musicianship. Think of all those great mandolin licks on the Parchment albums. Most studios, especially the Christian ones, buried these invidual sounds not having the skills or will to display them in the time constraints of vinyl. The cry of "we can't hear the words" didn't apply as Pantry knew how to balance singing with instruments.

So by the time Pac, Yates-Round and McClellan were producing for Grapevine they had learnt from a master.

Pantry's solo music style was very much man and piano, Elton John style, not necessarily to everyone's taste, but he was/is a talented song-writer. There's a discography and other information here at CrossRhythms, including a link to the Canaan story.